I am an IT architect who regularly diagrams complex technology landscapes. It is useful for me to see the whole picture, however when introducing other stakeholders to it I’d like to be able to use layers (or something conceptually equivilent) to create a simpler view and then progressivly add in more detail to aid in comprehension.

For example I might start with the current state “layer”, and then add in another “layer” which shows what we need to change, and/or perhaps yet another “layer” with what needs to be removed.

Another scenario I often do is to show how a process steps through a landscape, to do this I often take a single business process and overlay numbers overtop lines or boxes, and add legend at the side with a description of what is going on in each number. I do this with one layer per process. Today I can do this with actual layers, but I cannot change the visibility of anything in the page layer, which would be helpful.

Therefore I would like to be able to set visibility on objects (lines, shapes, etc.) on a per layer basis, where an object could be visible or not on any given layer I create. If you have ever used Visio, this is how it behaves.